Lewandowsky thinks failure to get or find email is conspiracy theory

Wow, this Lewandowsky story just keeps getting more bizarre. It’s like nothing I’ve even seen before.

On DeSmog Blog, Lewandowsky says we are victims of “conspiratorial thinking” and promises “four more people will have egg on their faces.” Great, bring it.

So now there’s a conspiracy theory going around that I didn’t contact them. It’s a perfect, perfect illustration of conspiratorial thinking. It’s illustrative of exactly the process I was analysing. People jump to conclusions on the basis of no evidence. I would love to be able to release those emails if given permission, because it means four more people will have egg on their faces. I’m anxiously waiting the permission to release this crucial information because it helps to identify people who engage in conspiratorial thinking rather than just searching their inboxes.Desmogblog (http://s.tt/1mwBG)

Newsflash perfessor. We HAVE searched our inboxes and as I reported on Lucia’s blog:

I understand his problem, I get hundreds of emails a day. Sometimes I miss important emails in the deluge.

So far, on my home computer (where I do most WUWT work) I have not been able to find any evidence that WUWT received an invitation from uwa.edu.au” or Charles Hanich about that time. That doesn’t mean there isn’t any, as it is also possible it ended up in the spam filter and was deleted.

I’ll search my office computer today and get a second look, to see if perhaps it resides there.

Lewandowski should know that if you really want to reach people in this day and age, don’t assume email is reliable. Back in the DARPA days, before SPAM accounted for a significant portion of Internet traffic, it was reliable. Now today, for anything truly important I follow up with a phone call and repeated emails until I get a response.

Lewandosky’s assistant apparently made an assumption not supported by a reply, Lewandowsky made a further unsupported assumption about “privacy”.

Per my previous comment, in addition to my home computer, I did a search on my office computer for:

“uwa.edu.au”
“Charles Hanich”
“Hanich”

And got no emails.

So either it was never sent, or ended up in SPAM and was deleted.

I see a lack of due diligence on the part of Lewandowsky if he really wanted skeptics to take the survey. The fact that he delegated the task to an underling, did no assurance follow up, and went with one-sided sampling tells me he his goal was to create a paper that fit his pre-conceived notions.

There’s no science involved in this paper, just opinion and confirmation bias of the highest order.

The fact that this paper passed peer review is even more troubling.

=====================================================

To be extra thorough, I also searched again just now for “kwiksurvey” which is the name of the survey website Lewandowsky used. Nothing. I repeated all the searches I made above using two methods.

1. Email search tool for my email client

2. Computer file search tool – looking at every file (including the thousands of emails I have back to 1998)

While I found some files with the keywords, none of them were the survey participation invitation.

So explain to me professor Lewandowsky, how failure to receive or be able to find emails supposedly sent, without any other mode of contact or attempts at communication is somehow conspiracy theory.

If Lewandowsky sent an email, it likely ended up in SPAM. Lots of “take our quick survey” emails are spam these days. He should know better than to trust email as the only contact medium for something he deems important. Instead, he accuses us of being conspiracy theorists when we ask for proof.

There are even more strange things about this. Deltoid had already hosted the survey before McIntyre was even emailed once. McIntyre apparently did not recieve the same invitation or a link to the same survey. Deltoid got their invitations from Professor Lewandowsky, not the assistant. Lewandowsky said no skeptic hosted the survey, but Junkscience did. Did Lewandowsky not even check the sites of skeptics he emailed?

Er, why does he have to beg permission to release emails that HE sent??? That sounds a bit odd. Plus I don’t know how much stock I’d put into whatever format he used to try to prove that sent them… though maybe that’s more foolproof than I’d expect. Heh, given the number of spoofed emails I’ve gotten supposedly from “myself” trying to sell me weight loss products (I weigh 115 soaking wet) over the years I don’t have a lot of faith in what the headers say.

“People jump to conclusions on the basis of no evidence. I would love to be able to release those emails if given permission, because it means four more people will have egg on their faces. ”

Lewandowsky is playing a game. He’s asserting that any responses he received are in confidence, and so he cannot release them without permission of the authors. That’s just a clever ploy to distract everyone’s attention from the fact that he needs no such permission to release HIS emails which he claims he or an assistant sent. The replies are not the evidence we seek, it is the existance of the original request that is being challenged.

All Lewandowsky need do to set the record straight is release his original requests. As they are his, and his alone, they contain no confidential information (other than email addresses perhaps) that he has any moral, ethical, or legal duty to protect.

Fess up Lewandowsky. Who did you send the supposed emails to, date, time, and what did they say? It is up to those you accuse to decide if they wish to keep their responses private or not. You have no say in the matter. All you need do it show us the evidence that you sent what you say you sent. The burden of proof is upon you to demonstrate that you send the emails in the first place. In this case, absence of evidence is, in fact, evidence of absence.

I said before, Lewandowsky’s work is exactly the quality of research we’ve come to expect from climastrologists. So it comes as no surprise his response is exactly what we would expect from Mann or other members of the ‘Team’. This whole affair reinforces the notion that ‘Climate Science’ related articles usually aren’t science at all. In most cases, it could be more aptly described as headline grabbing BS, put out by grant grubbing, pseudo-scientific media whores who piss and moan when someone points out they didn’t follow the scientific method.

I use Kwiksurvey and generally it is a good and cheap survey instrument, but this summer its site was hacked and a lot of data was lost on surveys in progress. They did a really good job of restoring what they could (and I got the survey data I needed back, but in a limited form which made it difficult to analyze).

However I question why a university would use this site – I just it because it is FREE. But a university??? Really???

Speaking of responses, I saw an interesting one on RPjr’s site yesterday from David Arpell. Now I am hesitant to sound critical of David here, knowing how tight he and Anthony are, but in this instance I will risk it. In a responce to another commenter who stated that China’s CO2 production now exceeded that of the US and Europe combined, David provided the actual figures to show how wrong the original commentor was. China produced only 8.5 gigatons verses the 8.9 combined number of Europe and the US. Huge difference, not even close really. Well, yeah I guess it is rather close. Close enough for it to be a fair bet that it will only be another couple of years before China has overtaken both regions combined. It certainly is close enough for the original poster’s point to stand – that efforts to reduce US and European emissions will have no effect on CO2 induced climate change.

The more interesting comment by David was something to the effect that per capita, China’s output was only 37% that of the US. I am curious as to the point David was trying to make with this statistic. The only point I can take away from it is that he believes Americans should live at the level of the average Chinese peasant. Now if David Arpell wants to crap in an outdoor toilet and then shovel it into his organic garden, more power to him. I’m going to stick with flush toilets and shopping at Safeway.

Looks like someone’s painted himself into a corner and is counting on belligerence and bluster to win the day. After Dr. Gleick’s spectacular implosion, you’d think people would be a little more careful about this sort of thing.

…Lewandowsky is playing a game. He’s asserting that any responses he received are in confidence, and so he cannot release them without permission of the authors. That’s just a clever ploy to distract everyone’s attention from the fact that he needs no such permission to release HIS emails which he claims he or an assistant sent. The replies are not the evidence we seek, it is the existance of the original request that is being challenged.

With respect, David, I don’t believe he’s that smart. He’s been caught out in the middle of a confirmation bias-fest, and instead of thinking clearly about the consequences of continuing to dig the hole he’s digging for himself, he’s gone on the offensive, believing it’s the best way to avoid having what actually happened thoroughly investigated by the likes of Steve McIntyre and Lucia.

davidmhoffer says:
September 7, 2012 at 8:42 am
“Lewandowsky is playing a game. He’s asserting that any responses he received are in confidence, and so he cannot release them without permission of the authors. That’s just a clever ploy”

That’s not clever at all. He’s wrecking the reputation of the journal, his institution and his own.

They can write all the propaganda they want anyway without behaving stupid like this. Now, the whole world is watching.

Clever? Not so.

Lewandowsky!
The whole world is watching!
Come on, make an even larger fool of yourself. We’re waiting.

Reminds me of an attack against Mitt Romney where he was accused of paying no income tax by Harry Reid. When Harry Reid was asked to prove this claim, Senator Reid simply said it was up to Mitt Romney to prove him wrong. The issue is still alive showing how successful the accusation without proof was. I always thought one of the primary human rights was to be innocent until proven guilty and not the other way around. It seems that to a leftist, you are guilty unless proven innocent and by the way they will fight you every step of the way to prove your innocence.

Has anyone suggested that Dr. Lewandowsky’s poor scholarship and inadequate methods were proposed to him or aided by other parties? Other than a conspiracy of one (inadequate approach) and doubtful abilities to formulate an argument, I have yet to see any conspiratorial thinking or evidence. OTOH, a method to try to “devaluate” the sceptical position by getting a rise and inordinate (hyserical) feedback from the blogosphere to prove a point about the targets of his invective (I am hesitant to use the d-word.)

“…So now there’s a conspiracy theory going around that I didn’t contact them. It’s a perfect, perfect illustration of conspiratorial thinking….”

Conspiracy : (noun) 1: a secret agreement between two or more people to perform an unlawful act [syn: confederacy]

How can the actions of Lewandowsky’s “I”, above, an individual, constitute a conspiracy in anyone’s mind? Is Loosky revealing that he believes himself more than one individual, thus capable of being in conspiracy with himself? If so, this would seem to be a perfect, perfect illustration of delusional thinking.

I see a lack of due diligence on the part of Lewandowsky if he really wanted skeptics to take the survey.

I see a complete lack of due diligence period. A conspiracy theory is not required to explain that, just incompetence, dishonesty and an unbelievably poor grasp of his native language. Somebody should tell Lewandowsky that for it to be a conspiracy, it needs to involve more people than just him, unless he has multiple personality disorder, then just him.

Saying you’ve contacted five blogs isn’t meaningful from a research perspective, unless you also include whether these blogs ever acknowledge receipt of your request. He doesn’t acknowledge that he has failed to follow the simplest guidelines for competent academic practice, instead as is the wont for his sort, points fingers to others and blames them for his own clumsy research methods, general ineptitude and failures to properly execute what should have been a simple study.

Lewandowsky, Gleick, and others seem to resemble characters in old Roger Corman B-flicks such as The Little Shop of Horrors and Bucket of Blood, wherein a nerdy misfit’s inept attempt to rise within a subculture and get a girl meets with improbably wild success– for awhile– only to be turned into a period of bloody cover-ups and a final horrific revelation as the artifice unravels. More popcorn!

REPLY: And when asked, the troll known as caerbannog666 refuses to answer the question. If it isn’t true, why the reticence to answer? Lousise you really need to get up to speed, as you keep striking out here. – Anthony

It sounds like a poorly designed trap and bluff on Lewandowsky’s part.

Unknown people are going to get egg on their face for lying(?) about his invitation, but he can’t release it?

Is he hoping that that people, who according to him, do (or do not) exist in his email outbox will step forward? One scenario has a possibility of happening but the other puts him in quasi-reality of his own making.

Lewandowsky’s stance then: Circular reasoning and an option for a logical explosion, similar to an egg which may or may not fall on ones face and break open.

This reminds of why in the Soviet Union all the best minds went into math, engineering or the hard sciences. The social sciences could be easily co-opeted and were completely manipulated by the government for propaganda purposes.

Lewandowsky shows us that the best minds still don’t go into the social sciences.

Has he asked for permission? You’d think if he’d really “love” to release them, he would have at least asked for permission. And if he did ask for permission and was denied, you’d think he’d be all too happy to say he asked but was denied.

Lewandowsky’s server should have a log file of all emails sent. If pressed, Lewandowsky should be able to produce and present that file as proof that he sent email invitations to all concerned parties. Or not, of course. The log file may instead reveal lacunae in the invitation list; maybe even systematic lacunae. Proof positive, one way or the other. No more need to speculate, derogate, or ummm, conspiratate. :-)

I’m anxiously waiting the permission to release this crucial information because it helps to identify people who engage in conspiratorial thinking rather than just searching their inboxes.
Desmogblog (http://s.tt/1mwBG)

Yeah, sure he is. /sarc/

Dr. Lewandowsky must know that he is in a serious jam. His blustering response will not help him out of it.

Anthony – why should he need to answer you at all? You accused him of something and seem to think it is up to him to defend himself. How is that different to Alexwade’s comment regarding the accusation levelled at Mitt Romney?

REPLY: I have no idea about the Romney/Alexwade thing as this is the first mention I’ve seen of it. Science is supposed to have standards. If you can’t show your method and data to be reproducible (and so far Lewandowsky can’t/won’t) then it isn’t science. As the data gatherer, quality control is his responsibility. It seems clear he made no effort to ensure a balance in sampling, leaving participation to the whims of email delivery.

I’ll continue to ask those tough questions (as is my right) while you continue to be an unquestioning cheerleader for the Team. Be as upset as you wish. Cheers, -Anthony

Hi Anthony. Just to cover all bases, if your your email app has a SPAM filter log have you checked that log for processing the “missing” emails?

REPLY: it does have a SPAM log, and all quarantined emails are saved, but I routinely delete it. So there’s no record back to 2010 unfortunately. For example in just this past week, I deleted ~20,000 spam emails. As I’ve said many times, my email is a firehose. – Anthony

I wanted to survey some teamsters, so I had a friend of mine leave the surveys on the windshields of some trucks. I also went to my local university bookstore coffee shop and left some surveys there. I now have several survey responses and can write up an accurate paper describing what teamsters think.

REPLY: it does have a SPAM log, and all quarantined emails are saved, but I routinely delete it. So there’s no record back to 2010 unfortunately. For example in just this past week, I deleted ~20,000 spam emails.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Even that wouldn’t be definitive. Most anti-spam strategies have layers of defense. The first layer employs rules that are 99% accurate and never let’s them into the email environment itself. Those 20,000 emails deleted from the spam folder are the ones that were passed through to the second layer for additional inspection and stuck in the spam folder pending manual deletion. The first layer probably deleted another million emails or so!

Which is why if you have something important to communicate, and you haven’t exchanged email with that particular person before, it is important to find an alternate means of confirmation (phone call, post in tips and notes, even a comment in a thread will work). It is also why the onus is on the person who claimed to send it to prove that they did, not on the person who may or may not have received it.

manicbeancounter also reviewed the data that Lewandowsky collected (the version that was made public at least).

This is where the real contraversy is. His data does not even come close to supporting the claims made (let alone the fact that the collection method was salted). It should be withdrawn on this basis alone.

For example, of the 6 people who believed Nasa faked the moon landing, 4 of the 6 were strong/moderate believers in climate change theory. Same with most of the other conspiracy issues. The only correct claim is that skeptics are more likely to be free-market supporters (and believers are more likely to hold left-wing economic philosophies).

davidmhoffer says:
September 7, 2012 at 11:29 am
It is also why the onus is on the person who claimed to send it to prove that they did, not on the person who may or may not have received it.

Which is why, if I am sending an important email, I always ask for a “Delivery Status Notification” AND a “Return Receipt”. And even this is not foolproof as many systems do not offer a “Return Receipt” option [or so I have been informed].

One would think that Lewandowsky would at least have asked for and retained a Delivery Status Notification for every blog to which he sent the survey.

Has an expert in his field through extension personal experience he may have had a good point but then , “. I would love to be able to release those emails if given permission, because it means four more people will have egg on their faces.” what ever point he had is thrown away via some desperate BS to cover this tracks .

“The more interesting comment by David [Arpell] was something to the effect that per capita, China’s output was only 37% that of the US. I am curious as to the point David was trying to make with this statistic. The only point I can take away from it is that he believes Americans should live at the level of the average Chinese peasant.”

The bad news, Tim, is that Gina Rinehart in Australia, for one, certainly seems to feel just that way about us “wealthy” (though not nearly as wealthy as her) Westerners. The idea is not as unspeakable as it should be.

As for Lewandowsky, even “bizarre” hardly seems to cover it. I’m all agog for the next instalment.

This is getting worse by the minute. Conspiracy theory? What is this guy talking about?
That’s babbles without reasoning. He does not need any allowance to show who he invited, these are his own mails – this is ridiculous.
Contacting per email nowadays without at least trying to establish a contact otherwise, at least one phone call or one post in a blog (he tries to contact blogs!) is raising higher the ridicule level. I just received these days several spam mails with “prizes for survey takers” “your paid survey is here” “red lobster survey” “super survey available”, but believe me I do not have a blog and did not read past the title in the spam folder, hope it was not a mail from the “professor”…
Contacting only one side of the debate is trying to influence the outcome. This is the first validation of any statistical work to get a representative sample of the population!
What university was he from?
Graham has struck the nail on the head here, it deserves reposting:
“They say that fish rot from the head, so could the drop in Australia’s performance in education be due to the quality of some of the academics holding tenured positions at universities rather than what happens in primary and secondary school?
If credentialled, well-funded and tenured tertiary institution staff are capable of dishing-up research which should fail an undergraduate, what chance have lower echelons.”http://www.ambitgambit.com/2012/09/06/fish-rot-from-the-head-part-1/

F. Ross;
And even this is not foolproof as many systems do not offer a “Return Receipt” option [or so I have been informed].
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

You’ve been informed correctly. Plus, even for systems that have that feature, it can be turned off at the administrator and the user level. I have my personal settings turned off, so read receipt requests are ignored by default.

In the references section of Lewandowsky’s paper are other ‘analysts’ who have papers, presentations, etc in which they make assertions that skeptic climate scientists are corrupted by fossil fuel industry money – Boykoﬀ, Dunlap, Freudenburg, Lahsen, McCright, Mooney, Oreskes, Stephen Schneider. Each in turn cites a single source in their own writings and speeches to say skeptic climate scientists are paid by ‘big coal & oil’ to manufacture doubt about global warming: Ross Gelbspan.

And regarding the “Gleick” coincidence that commenter TomRude (September 7, 2012 at 8:29 am) suggested, I pointed out the Desmogblog/Gelbspan/Gleick/Gore associations back in February: “Fakegate Opens a Door: More than meets the eye in the Heartland controversy” http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/02/fakegate_opens_a_door.html

Funny thing about AGW promoters suggesting conspiracies on the part of skeptics, when what we have instead appears to be 20 solid years of efforts by enviro-activists to manufacture doubt about the credibility of the skeptics.

.. ask for a “Delivery Status Notification” AND a “Return Receipt”. And even this is not foolproof

—-

Your right about that. I never automatically acknowledge receipt. That just informs the sending bot that it’s a live E-mail addy that someone actually reads and asks for a magnitude increase in the amount of SPAM sent to it.

Not being original here, but our Stefan’s modus operandi reminds me of:

“But Mr Dent, the plans have been available in the local planning office for the last nine months.”

“Oh yes, well as soon as I heard I went straight round to see them, yesterday afternoon. You hadn’t exactly gone out of your way to call attention to them, had you? I mean, like actually telling anybody or anything.”

“But the plans were on display …”

“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”

“That’s the display department.”

“With a flashlight.”

“Ah, well the lights had probably gone.”

“So had the stairs.”

“But look, you found the notice didn’t you?”

“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard’.”

Anthony,
Would you be supportive of something like this? No point investing the time unless you are on side. Other blogs too, but you have easier access to their owners than I do. Also, would fair use come into play? Ideally I think we’d want to replicate the questions verbatim, no idea if that would raise issues or not.

Plus, I ain’t no statistician, someone else would have to do the analysis.

timg56 comments that
……………………………………….
The bad news, Tim, is that Gina Rinehart in Australia, for one, certainly seems to feel just that way about us “wealthy” (though not nearly as wealthy as her) Westerners. The idea is not as unspeakable as it should be.”

One of the things I have come to love in this debate is hearing the constant refrain about it is all simple physics and anybody not accepting that is in denial. I keep asking about the simple arithmatic and hear crickets chirping.

Simple numbers really, such as how much impact would there be if the US and Europe were to magically figure out how to reduce their CO2 emissions by 50% in 10 years?

Or how many of the 50 million climate refugees have shown up?

How about adding up the number of islands or low lying coastal regions which have disappeared?

Chirp, chirp.

Steve C,

At least in the US we still have the insurance policy of firearms ownership should some group try to force us back into a 14th century life style.

If Lewandowsky did contact sceptical blogs in 2010 has he done so again? He doesn’t need to ask them for permission to name them, just contact them again in private. That would immediately flag up any of the 5 who never actually got the email due to reasons of spam filters or whatever.

His “motivated reasoning” does not exactly help him to be a trustworthy judge of survey questions and data, scientific study of “climate skeptics” etc. when he is so fervently, uncritically allied to Michael Mann.

Lewandowsky is behaving as a highly partisan activist, not as a scientist.

Watts Up With That has currently around 125 million hits.
It is a major forum for anyone interested in Climate.
Any study of the beliefs of CAGW Skeptics must surely be diminished if WUWT is not included.

Stephan Lewandowsky claims to have sent WUWT, ONE email asking for collaboration on his project.
An email which he is unwilling to publish, so that its validity, date, content etc can be confirmed.

1. Shouldn’t he have tried just a little harder?
2. Shouldn’t he publish the request, just to prove he tried at all?

Lewandowsky tries to discredit skeptics partly by pointing out that blogs are a primary medium through which skeptics publish their perspectives, saying “By definition, denial is difficult to practice in the peer-reviewed literature….The internet, by contrast, provides opportunity for individuals who reject a scientific consensus to feed ‘each other’s feelings of persecution by a corrupt elite’ (McKee & Diethelm, 2010, pp. 1310–1311). Accordingly, climate ‘skeptic’ blogs have become a major staging post for denial..”

It’s terribly unfair for him to say that, but we need to understand that this demeaning attitude towards blogs is pervasive. Accordingly, I believe WUWT and other skeptical blogs need to be STRIKINGLY different from the typical online blog. That means no more Hitler-parody videos or anything like that. It needs to be IMMEDIATELY OBVIOUS to anyone who ever visits this website that this is a serious place for serious discourse.

Lewandowsky “knew” (believed) that climate skeptics are conspiracy theorists and he went to construct a survey and article to say so. Talk about motivated reasoning! He is a prime exemplar of the process. He does a lot of bloviating in various places, and his favorite meme seems to be that skeptics about climate science must be conspiracy theorists.

Here he is on May 3, 2010 likening climate skeptics to 9/11 “Truthers”:

He sounds so much like Michael Mann, both extremely opinionated activists using “climate science” to promote their own socio-political agendas (it is NOT conspiracy-mongering to notice their public words and behaviors):

In 2010 John Cook of the notorious (and unreliable) SKepticalScience blog described working with a U. Western Australia cognitive scientist (it would appear to be Lewandowsky?) on cognition experiments about skepticism on climate change:

A BH commentator guesses that the project may have been dropped and that Lewandowsky may have had pangs of scientific conscience, but that seems to be only guesswork. Did these experiments go forward, and did they involve Lewandowsky? It is well worth trying to determine if this project/experiment went further, or if it morphed into Lewandowsky’s later (very different) survey approach.

The Cook/SkS project involved having SkS regulars fabricate fake “skeptic” quotes on the blog for use in the experiment! They wanted to study cognition with and without exposure to various statements. One wonders if this went very far, and why they could not find real skeptic quotes to use.

Did Lewandowsky know of and endorse creating fake skeptic quotes which were publicly posted on the blog?? (were they ever posted or not?)

Psych experimenters might legitimately create statements within a study which are well vetted and controlled for, to study how people respond, but if fake “skeptics” were created on the public blog that might be a different kettle of fish.

It all sounds amateurish, unscientifice, and of dubious research ethics.

Two things might clear this up.
1. Dr. Lew, resend the invites. (Sounds like you should start all over again anyway.)
2. The blogs he say’s did respond, give him permission to release your response. You might also put your permission/response up here at WUWT. Nothing like the light of day to kill a conspiracy theory!
PS “Conspiracy Theory” was a good movie.

The bit I like the best is thinking that here is the man? who lied, deceived and misinformed now asking permission to release emails that HE originally sent. If this is the level of rational thought seen at the top levels of academia then we are truly buggered.

What’s the difference if he got replies refusing him permission to post his survey on skeptical sites or if he never sent the requests to skeptical sites in the first place? In either case, he didn’t talk to skeptics, so how can he publish a survey that purports to explain what skeptics think? Did he use telepathy to get this information? Or what?

Lewandowsky: “People jump to conclusions on the basis of no evidence.”
Isn’t that how got “The Hockey Stick” in the first palce?
******************************************************************************

Not quite. The Hockey Stick was never a conclusion, it was the original intention, and data was chosen/altered to obtain a stick

I don’t get why the skeptic side is giving this guy so much attention. His study was biased, everyone sees that, even the alarmists know that it was biased and give his study little credence. So please fellow skeptics, stop talking about this guy, stop giving him publicity and let him fall back into obscurity. We are shooting ourselves in the foot.

Once his name disappears from the blogosphere, he and his work will be forgotten.

Skiphil, I have some insight into that matter. The manufactured blog posts only appeared in SkS’s secret area, that was just a matter of convenience – it suited to use their secret forum as the vehicle to create the threads; that’s not an issue. It’s an issue that ardent warmists created both kinds of posts (warmist/skeptic) with the intention of presenting these to experiment participants for research purposes who still in the end would be none the wiser. There was no attempt at all to exert objective control over the data, just “hey guys, make some posts in these threads for my experiment – we’re doin’ science stuff with Stephan!”.

I don’t get why the skeptic side is giving this guy so much attention. His study was biased, everyone sees that, even the alarmists know that it was biased and give his study little credence. So please fellow skeptics, stop talking about this guy, stop giving him publicity and let him fall back into obscurity. We are shooting ourselves in the foot.

Once his name disappears from the blogosphere, he and his work will be forgotten.

What you “don’t get” is that “the skeptic side” does not want Lewandowsky and his work to “be forgotten”. Some reasons for this are as follows.

Firstly, alarmists shout the lie that “peer review” is some sort of validation of published information especially when the information is published in a leading journal. But even alarmist bloggers can see that Lewandowsky’s paper is complete rubbish although it was peer reviewed and published in a ‘leading’ journal.

Therefore, whenever the ‘peer reviewed lie’ is proclaimed then that lie can be rebutted with, “So how do you explain Lewandowsky’s survey paper?”.

Secondly, accountability is the only constraint on misconduct by scientists. Prestige is important to scientists: they would have followed a different career if personal wealth were their great motivation. So, accountability for misconduct is a serious deterrent to misconduct by scientists because revelation of misconduct trashes the career and reputation of a scientist. But ‘Climate scientists’ have escaped accountability for much outrageous misconduct e.g. as revealed by the ‘climategate’ emails and, therefore, many feel – with good reason – that they are unaccountable.

There is a clear possibility of holding Lewandowsky to account for his gross misconduct in the production of his survey paper. And holding him to account would be a breakthrough in applying normal scientific accountability in ‘climate science’. The benefits of this deterrent to misconduct could be very great.

Thirdly, smears of ‘climate realists’ are normal behaviour for alarmists. Lewandowsky’s paper is a clear example of a bogus smear of climate realists. Publicity of the example could cause e.g. mainstream journalists to be less receptive when presented with such smears.

Lewandowsky: “People jump to conclusions on the basis of no evidence.”
Isn’t that how got “The Hockey Stick” in the first palce?
******************************************************************************

Not quite. The Hockey Stick was never a conclusion, it was the original intention, and data was chosen/altered to obtain a stick
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I stand corrected.

In Canada we had what was called in the media the “robo-calls” scandal. It was reported in the media that it was a big part of the reason the Conservative (our republican) party won the election. Someone was using an automated system to steer voters to the wrong polling stations. It was very quietly reported (not at all IMHO) that when the perpetrator was found, it turned out the source was a Liberal (democrat) constituency office. The mindset is appalling. Right in line with the Gleicks of the world. Win at any cost. Stick to the truth and you win the long game every time.

klem says:
September 8, 2012 at 3:18 am
I disagree. Expose his lack of integrity and the methods he uses to help the general public see the lengths these people will go to to control the message. The general public does not know or seem to care who any of the players are in the climate melee.

Ian Weiss says:
September 7, 2012 at 5:42 pm
“….
It’s terribly unfair for him to say that, but we need to understand that this demeaning attitude towards blogs is pervasive. Accordingly, I believe WUWT and other skeptical blogs need to be STRIKINGLY different from the typical online blog. ”

Ian, things are on the move and irrelevant how “pal-review” goes and irrelevant how deep they dug their heads in the sand when a blog review is putting the finger where it pains, with logic, data and quality review there is no way for them as to retract or to try to fix -as we have seen again and again.
Ignoring the blog will only postpone the inevitable and make the matter worst.
I love the example with NASA and rrresearch as it is not climate related.
Who ever heard of rrresearch? Certainly less people then the ones who heard of NASA. But in one blog review the red haired lady put the NASA paper – which proudly announced arsen to replace phosphor in living bacteria – to its place: the trash bin.http://rrresearch.fieldofscience.com/2010/12/arsenic-associated-bacteria-nasas.html

There are many good quality, skilled people out there who do not have the time or the vanity or the resources to put a paper through peer-review and publish, but they can read and point out the errors of many such papers within hours if they take the time to do so.
This is why blog review is becoming so relevant and this is why the warmista try now to spin “what to do with the contrarians”.https://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/09/01/wuwt-is-the-focus-of-a-seminar-at-the-university-of-colorado/
WUWT has a great deal of such good quality people who know much about climate and hard sciences (physics, chemistry) this is why people like hanging around and reading through the comments, and this is why low quality papers once taken into focus get busted within days.
Similar communities gathered at climate audit, Jo Nova and some other.
They cannot silence the blogs, they cannot control them and they cannot ignore them.
Well, they try. This is why the demeaning attitude and comments.
But as “they” silenced discussion on “their” blogs, as they practice “pal-review” and “keep those papers out with any price” (or something like this), the result is they made blogs be great, because it is the only place where scientific conversation continues.